Former primary school headteacher Mathew Hargreaves has been jailed for 25 months after taking an indecent image of a child and downloading hundreds of child abuse pictures over about five years.
Hargreaves, 48, was arrested in May after police received intelligence relating to the sharing of indecent images of children online. A warrant was executed at his home address, where several electronic items were seized.
Claims of accidental viewing rejected
Initially, Hargreaves claimed he had innocently stumbled across the materials while browsing swingers websites. However, analysis of his devices revealed he had downloaded 12 category A indecent images, eight in category B and 214 in category C. He was also found to have taken one indecent image of a school-aged girl.
During a second interview, Hargreaves, who has no previous convictions, remained silent. He later admitted taking an indecent image of a child and three counts of making indecent images of children.
Victim impact and sentencing
In a statement, the girl said the image was "a lot worse than I thought" and made her feel "sick, shocked, betrayed and confused." She added: "My biggest fear out of them all is where he shared it."
Sentencing at Liverpool Crown Court, Judge Simon Medland KC said Hargreaves had a "deeply ingrained sexual perversion" and had misused his intelligence to "secretly satisfy" himself. He told him: "To the outside world, you were happily married, in good employment and living a fine life. That has all come crashing to the ground."
Hargreaves was also handed a 10-year sexual harm prevention order and a restraining order banning him from contacting his victim for the same period. He will be required to sign the sex offenders' register for the next decade.
Detective Sergeant Viktorija Clarehugh, of Merseyside Police's online child abuse investigations team, said Hargreaves' insistence that the images came into his possession accidentally were "the desperate lies of a man who realised too late the consequences of his abhorrent crimes."
